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Wow – what a headline … okay, I admit it’s phrased quite sensational given that it anticipates just one possible interpretation of increasingly more births around summer / autumn compared to in spring … but I guess I just get more proactive at marketing with every post I publish!

Usual administrative units are too heterogenous for regional statistics. To make regions comparable, territorial units of similar population size are required. For the European Union and further states being associated in some way or another the NUTS (Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques) classification has been developed in 1980 and is being updated triennially.

There are four NUTS levels 0,1,2 and 3. Every region is designated a code consisting of two to five characters. The first two characters denote the state (the usual ISO-3166 two letter code – Greece being an exception as it is referred to with EL instead of GR). The characters following it in case of NUTS 1,2 and 3 form a hierachical system. So for example DE21H (Munich) belongs to DE21 (Oberbayern) belongs DE2 (Bayern / Bavaria) belongs to DE (Germany).

Eurostat is the institution within the European Union that organizes statistics from the 27 EU member states (f.x. from the German Federal Office of Statistics who also maintain a web-access to their data). Their web-site offers a wealth of statistics, reports, documents and visulization tools. It is pretty huge and I still get lost easily on it or discover new things. So this article doesn’t even try to show you around. I’ll just exemplify here one aspect of their site – the statistics database in context of a concrete question. In case you like population statistics thrown on maps you might be interested in the following articles which use data from Eurostat:

The question we’ll investigate

How regularly did people – differentiated in younger than or at least 65 years of age – in recent past die from a cause categorized as “Ill-defined and unknown causes of mortality”? We will be looking at national level (NUTS 0).

I was curious how gender-ratios of young women and men are distribute geographically in Europe. Eurostat offers absolute numbers for all NUTS2 regions in Europe. The most recent available figures were referring to January 2012 – in few cases like Turkey I was falling back to January 2011 due to missing values.